The manufacture of components for lightwave transmission via glass fibers is emerging as a natural and significant part of semiconductor work. For example, to receive light from a fiber, an avalanche photodiode (APD) is often formed in a silicon chip and utilized to convert such light to electrical pulses. Unfortunately, such components are so miniature and difficult to manipulate that coupling the output from a fiber to the input of a diode is a challenging task.
In a convenient coupling technique, the light emitting end of a fiber is slipped into a bore in a guide having a body typically about 1/8 inch in diameter and length. Prior thereto, at the opposite end of the body, a disc-like stud is installed having an APD chip mounted thereon which faces toward the bore. When the stud is carefully installed with the APD in proper position and the guide is slipped over the end of a fiber, light emitted therefrom impinges upon and operates the APD. A problem is to accurately align the APD to the bore because the APD has a microscopically small target area and the bore is correspondingly small.
It will be appreciated that an operator substantially obscures one end of a guide while aligning a stud thereto leaving only an opposite, fiber-receiving end for observing the alignment. Moreover, to properly guide a glass fiber the bore is made so small that one can barely discern it with the naked eye. Furthermore, it is difficult to look through the bore with a microscope to align an APD because one observes the bore and the target area in varying shades of grey.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop new and improved expedients for aligning a workpiece to a body having a bore. It is further desirable to align a workpiece having a microscopically small target to a correspondingly minute bore in a small body.